1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an electrical connector housing for installation aboard vehicles, and in particular to a housing whose internal circuit conductors are composed of a plurality of printed circuit boards. In the present invention, the electrical connector housing is designed such that connections with outside circuits can be made very easily.
2. Description of Related Art
As shown in FIG. 1, a common electrical connector housing has a casing 2, in which a plurality of circuit elements (such as busbars 3 for internal circuits, electrical cables 4, printed circuit boards 5, etc.) are superposed on an insulating plate 6. An example of such a connector is described in more detail in document JP-A-2000-92659. The external face of the casing 2 is provided with one or several connector-receiving units, fuse-receiving units and relay-receiving units. These receiving units are equipped with terminals that are bound to the corresponding circuit elements and project into the receiving units, so that these terminals can be connected to outside connectors.
In this state of the art, the respective printed circuit boards 5 include connector-receiving units 7a and 7b, so as to provide connector outputs for each board.
However, the above configuration requires an increased number of parts, as the number of connectors and of connecting sites between the conductors of printed circuit boards increases. Moreover, such a configuration creates many constraints and unnecessarily increases conductor patterns. As a result, the number of layers of the printed circuit boards must be increased, which in turn raises material costs and increases the size and weight of the electrical connector housing manufactured.
Also, dies for forming busbars are very expensive. At the same time, there is a strong demand for miniaturizing, lightening and condensing the electrical connector housing. Such reasons have led users to choose printed circuit boards instead of busbars. This tendency has created new problems, namely how to simplify the connections between a printed circuit board and an outside connector, as well as between respective printed circuit boards.